Saturday, June 16, 2012

Nicole Markotić, Bent at the Spine

"No such thing as a prose poem"

mumbled the Cyclops. shining her black leather eye patch.
hard plastic mimics cement. trial children leap the ladder. rig construction
tumbles into the valley of faraway. yearly postcards line the ceiling. goes to
show how many pairs of boots fit into one box. x-rated continues his morning
breakfast to read that crocodiles have no tongue. except when he looks inside
one there brags the rogue organ. not tied or mangled just limp and jaded and
only slightly extinct

the font fades and 14 pages blew out the side window. well
isn’t that the way we harbour plot-line? each glottal stop opens the throat.
treat me to a new typeface or send metre back to the morgue. each flyleaf
remembers its copyright. true. each stammer confesses to grammar health

heroin could contradict this story or you could pretend
these words belong to the same sentence twice. every time you save your breath,
Hypothetical Barbara takes a bath

It
has been a while since a poetry collection by writer, editor and critic Nicole Markotić, and the publication of Bent at the Spine (Toronto ON:
BookThug, 2012) furthers an investigation into the sentence that began in her
two previous poetry collections – Connect the Dots (Toronto ON: Wolsak
& Wynn, 1994) and Minotaurs & Other Alphabets (Toronto ON:
Wolsak & Wynn, 1998) – as well as through two novels – Yellow Pages: a
catalogue of intentions (1995) and Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot
(Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008). Her prose is fantastic, and Yellow
Pages, a novel about silence, is one of my favourite [I included it some time ago in such a list of favourite Canadian novels]. Much of her work as a
poet focuses on the prose poem, and she is one of the few Canadian writers
exploring the form, a variant on what some others such as Jonathan Ball and
Jason Christie have been more recently exploring. In her essay, “New Narrative
and the Prose Poem,” she writes: “My interest in this form begins at the level
of the sentence.” It reminds of a fragment of an interview with Lisa Roberson I
keep quoting (by Kai Fierle-Hedrick in The Chicago Review 51:4/52:1,
spring 2006): “I’m really a gentleman collector of sentences. I display them in
cabinets.” In the same essay, Markotić writes:

I am interested in a dialogue about “new” narrative, which
is perhaps not so much new, as newly theorized. Many prose writers do not
consider themselves fiction writers, yet at the same time are not really part
of on-going poetics discussions which, for the most part, do not focus on
narrative. Although I also write prose fiction, I consider my prose poetry and
other alternative, interdisciplinary, and innovative sentences to be a neoteric
prose that both challenges and expands language boundaries.

For me, the prose poem is a poetic strategy embedded within
the structure of narrative, and a feminist response to patriarchal language and
forms. By embracing both prose syntax and poetic disruptions, the prose poem
defies conventional linear grammar and refuses to satisfy my desires for either
poetry or story. My desire is for so much more than causal, linear, rational
and persuasive normative sentences. In my novel and in my poetry, I try to live
between the prose of narrative and the fulfillment of the habit of fiction.

Carved
into a series of structurally-themed sections, the first sequence/section, “Big
Vocabularies,” jangles and sparks with a crackle and pop, as the opening of the
four-poem piece begins:

Indoor windows peek over haze, throw the role of doorway

into fixed jeopardy, burst the remedial bubble. Shaganappi

doesn’t fizzle; Shaganappi doesn’t

Link the vast grammar quirk

West of the coulees, the river jogs, the hoodoos idle, the

poem immobilizes

Highways curve into psychoanalysis, heal the road, heed

shoulders, divorce wild game, plant citizens

If, in deo, a cheese-grater replaces the blender, do you
waffle

the deco art?

Some
of the most striking pieces in the collection exist in the section “Widows and
Orphans,” which also appeared as a chapbook with Vancouver publisher Nomados in
2004 [see my review of such here], a collection (if recollection serves) of poems that bounced off titles
taken from overheard conversation (such as the piece above, “No such thing
as a prose poem,” where you can easily hear the jagged bounce of Paul Celan
influence). Riffing off found lines in a blur between poem and story, the
pieces as much respond to the title/line as bounce clear of the line, going far
further afield. Throughout the collection, her cadence and lines shift, altering
punctuation and breath-lines, holding only to the consistency and purposes of
each section, and each poem, itself. The section “guests” plays with the
structures and content of various poet friends and/or mentors, writing a
variant on George Bowering’s Curious (Toronto ON: Coach House Press,
1973), as well as a number of recent threads through his poetry since. Some of
her subjects include Bowering himself, as well as Robert Kroetsch [see the piece here, produced as an above/ground press broadside], Margaret Christakos,
Dennis Cooley, Fred Wah, Susan Holbrook, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré and Phyllis
Webb, among others. Circling the referential, the best of these poems work
deeper into a reaction and response to the writers and their works.

Webb Ghastlies and Anti-Ghastlies

Dear Phylly: What follows is a sort of rant, a
champagne-laden, bowl-shaped, opal and naked harangue. Alongside you, not
hurtling. They say you are solely a woman, and that you write poetry that
doesn’t mess up the universe. They’re wrong: Pauline still reads the books you
haven’t yet written. She’s plotting to reinvent herself as D-eye-anna with an
“I” and to change the course of Canadian coffin texts. You refuse to publish
because you refuse to write. So they say. How am I to respond? What imitation?
What emulation? You write of the “Baby Ex Machina” as if we recognize
that baby, as if the Machina is never In. someday, your autobiography
will explode and I shall become ugly. If lucky. You once said an animal cannot
forever on them on them on them? Will I? Pumping blood, your Venus fly-trap
undercover spider opens a ventricle. A spy spied. By whom? you may ask. By the
useful. By the dozen. By the sliver of the zinc-plated satellite. Sometimes I
hear you writing in between the inbetweens. Because after condemned flames,
what? Charlatans, rogues, the usual muse stand-ins. I won’t listen, but Pauline
keeps reading with my fingertips.